George Fraser calls creativity, persistence, connections and capital the “gangsta moves” that black America must use to close the huge economic gap with white America.

If this doesn’t sound particularly subversive or gangster-like, neither is the 67-year-old author, inspirational speaker and founder of the world’s largest black networking organization, FraserNet Inc., based in Cleveland.

The crisply suited, silver-haired Zig Ziglar of the black world uses “gangsta” in the hip-hop fashion of rapper Jay-Z — meaning audacious measures to achieve the seemingly impossible.

Nearly 20 years ago, Black Enterprise dubbed Fraser the “new voice for African-Americans” when the magazine featured him on its cover. He wants to remain fresh and bold enough to engage upcoming generations.

“I absolutely love being able to relate to Generations X and Y,” he says. “To do that, you have to connect with them in their language.”

Fraser brought his message to Dallas recently when professionals, business owners, community leaders and economic hopefuls gathered for his company’s 11th annual national PowerNetworking Conference.

Fraser’s goals have been constant for 25 years:

Help black people attain wealth that can be handed down to the next generation.

Help black people become the No. 1 employer of black people in the 21st century.

“Not next year, not even while I’m alive, but by the end of this century,” he says in an interview last weekend during the conference. “Wherever black people are going in the 21st century, it will be because black people will take us there.”

Family net worth among blacks is about $6,000, compared with $60,000 for white families, he says. The gap is widening, not shrinking.

“We’ll be the first generation of Africans in America in 400 years to raise another generation of Africans in America who will be poorer than them. That’s unacceptable.”

Conference attendance of about 800 was disappointing, especially since there were so few locals. Fraser hopes to build on that during the next four years, when Dallas will host the four-day event. Next year, he hopes for 1,500, with a third from Dallas.

Atlanta, home of the conference for the previous six years, drew 1,800, with 600-plus from that area, in 2011.

Fraser knew coming in that there is a “disconnectedness of blacks” in Dallas’ predominantly white business community. That’s actually one reason the city was selected. “We’re going to roll into this community, stay for a half-decade and build relations from the ground up.”

HR executive Hattie Hill, chairwoman of the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau, says the multiyear commitment will, in fact, help the city become more inclusive because Fraser is a powerful connector.

“George Fraser keeps it real,” says Hill, who got her first one-on-one coaching session with Oprah Winfrey at PowerNetworking in 2005. “He is the trusted voice when it comes to leadership, personal growth and lifelong learning, specifically in the African-American community.”

No more self-pity

Soft-spoken Fraser’s dead-aim style might get him into trouble if he were white.

“Blacks contribute $920 billion to the U.S. economy. If we were a nation, we’d be the 18th-richest. But our money goes in one direction — away from us. We don’t spend it with each other, because too often we don’t like each other. There are issues with how we see ourselves and therefore how we see each other. It’s low race-esteem based on low self-esteem. Black people talk about this all the time.

“These are things that you can’t fix,” he says to lily-white me. “We have to fix them.”

On education:

“Every man and woman in our community must focus on personal growth and development, education and training, and move beyond what is so often intellectual laziness,” he says, pointing to a study indicating blacks spend an average of 70 hours a week in front of a TV.

“We have to demand more of our children. We can’t have 50 percent of our children dropping out of high school and have a meaningful community, meaningful culture and a meaningful future.”

On moving beyond victimized thinking:

“Black Americans have certainly been victimized in our 400 years in this country. We must forgive but not forget. We must bless that history and release it as a psychological hindrance to the progress we must make as a people. We need to use it as motivation — just as our Jewish brethren remember the Holocaust and use it as motivation for their quest for excellence and resources.”

In his past life, Fraser mopped floors at LaGuardia Airport while he attended college, wrapped Christmas gifts in the basement of a Cleveland department store and sold Encyclopaedia Britannica.

“Door to door, baby. Door to door,” Fraser says with a laugh. “I learned the skill of reading people, talking to people and listening for the words unspoken.”

Procter & Gamble Co. hired Fraser for its executive training program in 1972. He spent the next 17 years at P&G, United Way and Ford Motor Co.

“I’d learned marketing and branding from the masters of the universe,” he says. “I had the skills. I had the credentials. I had the pedigree. And I had ideas. I decided to share my lessons learned and make a business of it.”

Passing it along

Today, FraserNet is a global leadership network with 51,000 black professionals, business owners and community leaders on its database. About 20 percent of those are active participants paying a $10 monthly subscription, he says.

Annual revenue will be about $2 million. “It’s been our toughest year ever. Our revenue is down roughly 50 percent since the economy went south,” says. “We are social entrepreneurs. Our profits are recycled back into our community to improve the condition of the community.”

Fraser pays himself $1 a year. He lives off sales of his three books and about 75 to 100 speaking engagements each year. That gets his salary well into the six figures, enough to live on a golf course in Cleveland, he says.

Friday morning of the four-day conference, a room meant for 150 was packed wall-to-wall with hallway spillover for a session called Quick-Pitch Olympics, like TV’s Shark Tank on warp speed. Contestants had three minutes to sell a business plan that would impress the panel of multimillionaire judges, who were awarding thousands of dollars in prizes and critiquing each pitch.

Ladonna Farrow, 46, an executive travel consultant from Compton, Calif., says: “Being here has given me new ways of marketing my business, strategy, repositioning, branding all of those things are wrapped up into this one conference.”

“It’s very important that those who know the way and have lived a life of success and significance pass it along,” Tyson says. “That will help me stand on their shoulders to make an impact on the world as they have.”

Education: High school diploma in woodworking, 1963; part-time student City College of New York, 1963-1965; Dartmouth College Minority Business Executive Program, 1996, 1998.

Books:Success Runs in Our Race; Race for Success and Click: Ten Truths for Building Extraordinary Relationships. Soon-to-be-released: Who Would Have Thunk-It!: The First Adventures of the Fraser Foster Kids, co-authored with sister Emma Fraser-Pendleton

Personal: Married to Nora Jean for 38 years; two sons and a newborn granddaughter

Notable accomplishments: Volunteer of the Year award from the United Negro College Fund, 1978; featured in The New York Times best-seller Masters of Networking; inducted into the UCLA Minority Hall of Fame in 2011

The 67-year-old was born in Brooklyn’s crime-riddled Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, the 10th of 11 children. When he was 3, his mother became mentally ill. His father, a cab driver working 14-hour days, turned over his six youngest to the state.

After two years in an orphanage, George, and his year-older sister, Emma, and year-younger brother, Joseph, moved into foster care together in New York City.

In 1963, George graduated from high school with a vocational diploma in woodworking because nobody thought he was college material. In fact, his counselor had encouraged him to drop out and get a job.

When he aged out of foster care at 17, he had no place to go but back to his father’s Brooklyn brownstone. Emma was there, but so were three heroine-addicted older brothers.

George worked the midnight shift at LaGuardia Airport, mopping floors for a couple of years while attending City College of New York. But the situation at home was too toxic.

“Soon as I was able, I packed up, got on a Greyhound bus and headed to Cleveland, Ohio,” says Fraser, who still resides there. “I had a sister who was a practical nurse, and she took me in.”

Today, Fraser is considered the pioneer of business networking in the black community.

His sister, Emma Fraser-Pendleton, 68, who has five college degrees, is a well-regarded educational advocate who mentors administrators and trains school teams on how to address the needs of at-risk students in the New York City public school system.

Their kid brother Joseph became a drug dealer and was killed at 43 when his house was firebombed in March 1989 — the same month Emma was awarded a full fellowship at Harvard University.

She and George have spent countless hours talking about, as Emma puts it, “Why one goes over a cliff, while the other two climb it.”

George attributes it to two things: “My sister and I were wired differently than my brother. Secondly, my sister and I are fair-skinned, almost white. He had dark skin. Skin color plays into it to this day.”

Emma and George have written a children’s book about their rough upbringing — Who Would Have Thunk-It!: The First Adventures of the Fraser Foster Kids — that will be released at the Harlem Book Fair on July 21.

Emma says the recollections are largely hers.

“When I talk to George about the trauma we went through in our childhood, he has no memory. He buried it deep,” she says. “We had many, many years of conversations. He would say to me, ‘How do you remember that?’ And I would say to him, ‘How could you forget?’”

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About Cheryl Hall

MOST MEMORABLE EXPERIENCE ON THE JOB: Probably my most memorable event was with President George Bush (father) shortly after his failed bid for re-election. He'd been out of the limelight. I tried to ask him some political questions hoping to get a scoop. But he clapped me on the elbow and said, "Cheryl, one of the true joys of being out of office is I don't have to stand here and be interviewed by you. If you'd like to chat informally, I'd be happy to." I took a big breath, clapped him on the arm and said, "So George, how's the house coming?" He talked about going to Sam's and buying really big jars of spaghetti sauce. I felt like I was in the middle of a Saturday Night Live skit.

Another weird moment was going to a black-tie fete at the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant that was gearing up to be a fresh-food concept. My "date" for the evening was Dallas restaurateur Norman Brinker, who correctly predicted that the concept would never fly.

SOMETHING PEOPLE DON'T KNOW ABOUT ME: I can be both a bleeding heart liberal and a staunch conservative -- sometimes over the same issue.

IF I HAD TWO SPARE HOURS, I WOULD: Spare hours make me nervous. Given a spare year and plenty of money, I'd travel the world with my husband and daughter.

THE GREATEST CHALLENGE TO COVERING BUSINESS IN NORTH TEXAS: Knowing all the hidden connections among the key players.

Hometown: I was born in San Antonio, but as a military brat, I lived in Japan, suburban Washington, D.C., and Louisiana growing up.

Education: I have a bachelor's of fine arts received from Southern Methodist University in 1973.

I came to work for The Dallas Morning News in May 1972 as a summer intern in the business news department and never left -- so I've been here covering business for four decades.